By John M. Grondelski
Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural encyclical, is largely understood by the public as a document about artificial intelligence. The general public’s view is that, like his namesake 135 years ago in Rerum Novarum, Pope Prevost intends to address the “new things” of the twenty-first century.
To quote Abraham Lincoln: “There is some truth in this…”. But to continue his quote, “… I am glad of it, but it is not WHOLLY true.” (emphasis in the original)
Some even want to present Magnifica humanitas as a papal abandonment of “pelvic theology” in favor of “social justice.”
There is far less truth in that.
While the Pope sought to address the “new things,” good stewards know how to bring out of the Church’s treasury “things new and things old.” (Matthew 13:52) Yes, we need to address the “new things.” But we address them with the wisdom of old.
Yet the most central point of Magnifica humanitas is an even more fundamental anthropological truth: the human person cannot be replaced. The human person is irreplaceable. As Vatican II reminded us, the human person is the only creature on earth whom God loved for its own sake. (Gaudium et spes, 24)
The practical challenge posed by artificial intelligence is the likelihood of causing human unemployment through the technologization of work, especially basic work often labeled “entry-level” or “starter.” That especially threatens vulnerable populations: young people trying to enter the labor market, the inexperienced, and the unskilled. If a decade ago a certain presumption told miners to “learn to code,” today’s arrogant response might be “perfect your barista skills.”
Employment and unemployment are not merely economic phenomena because work (as Pope John Paul II noted 45 years ago in Laborem exercens) is not merely a cost factor. Employment is essential for human flourishing (which is a broader and more important category than economic prosperity itself, though the two are not mutually exclusive).
People need to work. A society that deprives people of work—in the name of a utopian vision or to maximize profits—is an inhuman society. And let us not allow some to get away with downplaying that truth because they do not want to admit that what they seek is a society driven purely by economics. As the old saying goes, these are people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
AI also poses a theoretical challenge. Since Plato—and especially since Descartes—there has been the temptation to think of the human person as a mind that simply inhabits a body. Contemporary transhumanism simply radicalizes that error by imagining consciousness separated from corporeality.
Christian anthropology insists, instead, that the human person is a bodily unity whose dignity cannot be reduced to information or computation. (Of course, according to certain early Church theologians, it was precisely that embodied condition that provoked the diabolical rebellion). The fact that some “transhumanists” have visions of minds separated from bodies dancing in their heads suggests that the theoretical threat continues.
The central problem is not technology: it is humanity.
Oren Cass captured this problem in his reflections on the usual question at social events: “What do you do?” Usually, Cass observes, it serves to pigeonhole people: doing X gives you special prestige, doing Y is inconsequential (except when those with that special prestige need food deliveries, plumbing repairs, or electrical work).
Very few ask the question from the standpoint of the Christian anthropological value of work, that is, in what way what one is finds expression in what one does?
A crucial truth of Magnifica humanitas is the centrality and irreplaceability of the human person. Man is not merely a thinker whom a machine can replace. Man is not merely a worker whom a robot must replace. The encyclical raises the question: do you believe that the qualitative distinction of a person outweighs their potential technological-economic substitutability? Is a person something more than a mere cog in someone’s grand design?
Because he is not a cog in God’s design. Yes, God created him and even gave him work to do, not as a punishment for sin, but because it was essential to his nature and his role as image and likeness of God. Man’s place in God’s universe is that of a free and loving person, invited to participate in free and eternal love with Three Loving Persons. That is the message of salvation. It is fundamentally different from man viewed as a divine artifact.
Insofar as Magnifica humanitas illustrates how AI could endanger that truth, it reveals a perspective on a broader question that the Pope answers from a Christian viewpoint: who is man? But that question is not implied only by AI. It is at stake in the “pill” mentality, reflected in the contraceptives of the 1960s and in today’s abortifacients mifepristone and misoprostol. That stance imagines that human problems and the consequences of human choices can be solved by some “pill.” It finds an echo in the subcultures of drugs and alcohol, which imagine that human happiness can be chemically induced on a temporary basis.
It is implied in what South African Archbishop Denis Hurley once called the “technological imperative” and writer Walker Percy, “technophilia”: the idea that if we can do something, we can, and perhaps even must, do it. And no one can put the genie back in the bottle once someone crosses a technological Rubicon.
It is the mentality that believes fertilizing eggs in test tubes is just another way of making babies, a “process,” perhaps even better in terms of “quality control” than the traditional way. Is conjugal love just another “process”?
That is why, despite the David Gibsons of the world, Magnifica humanitas is not a binary choice—and much less a division—between “pelvic theology” and “social justice.” Social justice begins in the womb: how a child gets there and whether he is protected once he is there. Yes, that child should one day have the opportunity to work. But that right presupposes the prior opportunity to live. God did not make man in his image and likeness only to work: he made him, above all, to be.
About the author
John Grondelski (Ph.D. from Fordham University) is former associate dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. All opinions expressed here are exclusively his own.